Bolden: New rocket differs from Constellation because “It’s going to be disciplined.”

I’ve been in College Station today on business, so I missed NASA adminstrator Charles Bolden’s visit to Houston.

However, in my stead Chronicle reporter Bobby Stanton attended a news conference with Bolden and asked him the following question.

Bolden in Washington. (Jacqueline Klimas/MEDILL)

Q. You have said that ending the Constellation Program was “purely budgetary.” But the SLS and MPCV look a lot like Constellation. What assurances can you give your NASA employees that these new programs won’t be canceled in a few years for purely budgetary reasons?

Bolden’s answer, in total, follows:

I’m not sure that I said ending the Constellation Program was ‘purely budgetary’ because it wasn’t purely budgetary. If it were purely budgetary we’d be right back where we were real quick.

This is about moving forward, and it’s about trying to find a program that’s affordable. And that means working with Congress to determine how much is going to be dedicated to exploration for America. Right now the total is $3 billion a year, is what they want for the next five years. Inside that amount of money, in order to be affordable, Mark Geyers has got to bring forth a multi-purpose crew vehicle. Mark May at the Marshall Space Flight Center has got to bring together a heavy lift launch vehicle, and then the little pieces that go with it – getting the launch pad ready and everything.

We’ve got to meter the development of those programs so that we get to certain milestones yet to be determined. But we’ve pretty much got a good idea of what they’re going to be and we should be telling you here pretty quickly what those milestones are going to be.

We like the idea of, get to each milestone with a whole package instead of just one thing.

What’s going to be different? It’s going be disciplined, it’s going to be the way we do business and things like using students to help us develop modules, which we did not do before … really integrating students and academia into this.

That’s building the ‘seed corn’ for the future generation that’s going to take my place.

The most striking thing about the answer to me is how Bolden says the new program is different from Constellation: it’s going to be disciplined, and students are going to help develop the modules.

The first part of the answer seems to be a slap in the face of the Constellation work force, and the second part might be a bit scary for future astronauts. No offense intended to students.